Ivy of Kopiaste and Val of More Than Burnt Toast have come together to create an international food-blogging event for World Food Day (Oct. 16) to heighten awareness for hunger in the world. The point isn't just to sit around and be depressed about it (a danger in my case, 'cause this sort of stuff makes me feel helpless and depressed!), but to focus on what each of us can do about it by donating to a local food bank or supporting sustainable, local agriculture (joining a CSA, using ingredients that are in season, etc), or contributing to international aide organisations like Action Contre la Faim. (And, I don't want to get too political, but voting for elected officials who support sustainable energy and foreign policy that takes into account some of these issues is helpful too!)

The rules of the event are to create a regional dish from your country or a family favorite that will feed 6 people and send it in. In the roundup after Oct 16th we will create a "conga line of international dishes to feed the world!" Of course, this brings up existential questions: my region? My country? Um... So, I chose a traditional French dish based on a recipe by an English man and translated into American and adapted by me!

For cooking:1 large chicken or "coq" (if you can find it. My butcher happened to have them and proudly showed me the beautiful comb of the one I chose before chopping its head off and cutting it into piece, at my request, ew, sorry to get graphic, back to the yumminess).1 large handful of baby onions7 oz smoked bacon2 carrots5 cloves garlic, peeled and halved3 sticks celery3 leeksa pinch of sage2 Tbsp olive oilsalt

Put the pieces of chicken in a large bowl or pot and prepare the marinade by pouring the wine over it and adding all the other ingredients. Let marinate 48 hours in the fridge, stirring after 24 hours.

When you're ready to cook it, take the chicken out of the marinade and drain. Keep the marinade! Chop the carrots, celery, and leeks (you could peel the carrots before you chop them, especially if they're not organic...). In a pressure cooker (or large pot), heat the olive oil. Put in the baby onions, bacon and pieces of chicken. Brown the chicken, then pour the marinade over it. Add the garlic, carrots, celery, leeks and sage. Salt and close the pressure cooker (or cover the pot). When the pressure cooker starts to sing, cook 35-40 minutes, depending on the size of the chicken. If you're using a pot, let simmer at least 1 hour until the meat is tender.

It's not a very photogenic dish, but it's loaded with flavor. I served it with some potatoes and it was delicious.

Serve however you like, but mostly don't hesitate to participate in the World Food Day event. Even if you don't have a blog, you can still create a recipe and email it with a picture to Ivy or Val and they'll post it on their blog!

Heat the crème until just warme with saffron rich,Then adde the beaten eggs for to mix.Spoon the onyon sauce into the pastry case,Then pour egg and crème custard into the base. (--Tarte à l'oignon à la Geoffrey Chaucer)

24 September 2008

En français ici.Well, I finally put my money where my mouth is and joined the French equivalent of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) called Les Paniers du Val de Loire in order to support local (ok, not Paris, but close), seasonal, organic foods. I signed up for their six-week trial at the end of which time I can sign up for the year! So once a week, in this case Fridays, I go to a local bar, head past all the tables and chairs to the back corner and pick up a paper grocery bag with my name on it.

Back at the apartment, it's like opening Christmas presents: what will we get this week? Sometimes the presents are the good kind, from friends who know you well, and once in a while, there's that tasteless sweater or framed photo of you 5-years-old naked watering the flowers that you hoped your significant other would never see -- I know it's obscure, but veggie-wise for me I'm talking about things like beets, and brussel sprouts.

This weeks goodies: pears (went into my apple-pear pie), green beans (got roasted with garlic), frizzy lettuce (went into a salad similar to this one), tomatoes (got roasted with chicken, among other things), and tons of zucchini (courgettes if you're not American).

We ate some of the zucchini stir-fried but there was still lots, so I decided to make zucchini bread, which according to Heidi (author of Super Natural Cooking) over at 101 cookbooks has the major advantage of getting rid of zucchini -- besides tasting good of course. This is my slightly-adapted version of her recipe. I made it with nuts and lemon and lime and 1 tsp of cumin instead of curry powder and it turned out absolutely delicious (if not quite as photogenic as Heidi's version). Click the link for her Special Zucchini Bread Recipe.

Preheat your oven to 350°F/180ºC. Butter two loaf pans or line with parchment, letting a little hang over the edge for easy removal.

In a small bowl combine the walnuts, lemon and lime zest. Set aside.

Beat (in a mixer) or cream the butter until fluffy. Add the sugars and beat again until mixture comes together and is no longer crumbly. Add the eggs one at a time and the vanilla and mix well. With a wooden spoon, stir the zucchini.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and cumin. Add dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir until just combined. Avoid over mixing!

Fold in half the walnut, and citrus zest. Save the other half to sprinkle on the tops of the loaves before baking.

Divide the batter equally between the two loaf pans. Bake for about 40-45 minutes. Keep in mind it will continue to cook a bit after it is removed from the oven. Remove from the oven and cool in pan for about ten minutes. Turn out onto wire racks to finish cooling - this is important so they don't get soggy!

In other news, Nina Timm over at My Easy Cooking has awarded me the I love your blog award, which I am honored to receive!

Here are the rules :

1) Add the logo of the award to your blog.

2) Add a link to the person who awarded it to you.

3) Nominate at least seven other blogs.

4) Add links to those blogs on your blog.

Ok, I hear those rules, but I don't know if I have time to appropriately present you with seven blogs. If you just want the list, than go ahead and click on any of the links under "Fun Websites" or "Good Cooking" because I love all the blogs I link to.

Otherwise, here are a few blogs I'm particularly loving lately:

Tea over at Tea & Cookies doesn't usually post stuff like this, but it's because she's too busy telling wonderful stories about her life and cooking experiences! She has inspired not only my most recent moon post, but also one of my very favorite recipes Comfort Coconut Noodles. Her stories are touching and her recipes are delicious. What more could you ask for?

My most recent discovery has been Alex Rushmer's blog Just Cook It. His musings on food and life are as funny as they are informative. Freelance writer, turned food paparazzi, Alex has just started a new blog, Candid Food, where you can see real food, exposed, without the makeup and the sexy lighting -- a bit like a food tabloid -- and, let me tell you, some of it is shocking!

Over the past few weeks, I've taken more time to look at the blog of my mentors Psychgrad and Giz over at Equal Opportunity Kitchen, and I have to send this award over their way as well! With the two of them teaming up, they post many delicious recipes and participate in lots of fun events. You can find all kinds of food over there (they're afraid of nothing it seems!), but it all looks yummy.

This weekend, there was so much kitchen activity that I didn't even have time to post a single recipe! I guess I had to make up for going away last weekend. On Friday, I made these brownies for D.K. to bring to a meeting with a group of writers who all participated in a collection of short stories together. On Sunday, I made another seasonal fruit pie : apple-pear, yummy!

And Saturday, I spent making a huge pot of tomato sauce to freeze while tomatoes are still in season and fresh at the market. It was very exciting because I got to use my wonderful new kitchen scale (the only one I could find that had both pounds and kilos). The tomato sauce making idea came from spending time at my parents' house this summer where my mom and I were trying to think what to do with all the tomatoes from the garden that we couldn't eat fast enough. We came up with this very simple recipe.

Core tops of tomatoes, and slice, removing the seeds. Put all ingredients (except salt & pepper) in a pot and simmer on medium heat for about 15 minutes until sauce begins to thicken. Take out whole herbs (or take out some and leave some in). Put through food mill. Add salt and pepper to taste.

18 September 2008

(5pm November light) I was surprised by the moon hanging – as if string-suspendedto light some private corner of the skylike a white paper lamp in a Chinese restaurantover a table for two

Or a thought – romantically outmoded:elbows on the windowsill,you and I watching the silvered stars come outover the parked cars of a quiet street.

Tea over at Tea & Cookies has been talking about the moon and I have to say, it's a subject that I feel very close to. I love watching the moon rise over the tops of the Parisian buildings, as it did so spectacularly the other night.

But of course my favorite is the moonrise over the ocean. I've spent many summer evenings writing bad poetry in an attempt to capture the splendor of it. Tea's favorite is the harvest moon and I can understand that. My favorite season is autumn in general (and no, not just because my birthday is in the fall, though that helps). I love the crisp air, the changing colors, the abundance of fruits and vegetables being harvested. It starts to get a bit chilly for summer salads, and you get to bring out the warm comfort food: noodles, soups, etc. One of my comfort foods is polenta. I love how you can do almost anything with polenta. It's like pasta or risotto that way. Boy, those Italians have it down, don't they (though if polenta is Italian, corn is American so it feels home-y).

This week I made my first polenta of the season. I'm definitely a lazy polenta maker (shame on me, I know). I buy the very fine-ground cornmeal so I don't have to cook it too long. I'm sure you'll find someone to tell you that the texture isn't as good, but I find it smooth and creamy and I'm not complaining. Feel free to borrow my ingredient ideas and make the polenta differently, however, if you're so inclined. I served this dish once with guacamole, and as leftovers with roast green beans; both were delicious, if I do say so myself.

(Yes, I noticed that my measurements get less precise as I go along, but I was getting hungrier and hungrier!)

Preheat the boiler (or oven).

For the polenta: bring the stock or water to a boil with the salt. Add the cornmeal in a steady stream while whisking briskly. Stir in the butter, herbs and red pepper flakes. Cover (the polenta likes to try to jump out of the pot and you have to head it off quickly!) and simmer for 5-10 minutes until thickened (fine-ground cornmeal cooks in about 5 minutes), stirring often. Remove from the heat and stir in the Parmesan and sun-dried tomatoes.

Pour the polenta into a baking dish (8X8 for example) and lay the cherry tomatoes on top. Sprinkle generously with feta and broil for about 3 minutes, until the cheese is golden on top. (If you don't have a boiler, you can put it in the oven for a bit longer to get the same results.) Serve warm while watching the moon rise.

15 September 2008

En français ici.Ok, I know what you're thinking: You're putting a lamb dish in your folder for cheap recipes?? Cheap compared to what? Caviar? Let me explain. One of the important things to do when you adore food but don't have a huge budget is to look at what's a on sale, particularly in bulk. With meat, one of the ways it becomes affordable is when it's past or almost past its sell-by date. Here's where you have to carefully inspect the piece you're buying to make sure it's still good, and you need to go shopping on a day when you'll have some time to cook because you can't let it sit around!

This was the case last week at the supermarket with lamb. There were pounds and pounds of lamb about to be thrown away because the sell-by date was yesterday and they were selling them for cheap. I love lamb. Sooooo... I bought a bunch and spent the afternoon making a big pot of lamb masala, froze some and ate some during the week.

This recipe is inspired by one of my favorite cookbooks, Mes recettes indiennes, written by a mother-daughter team (just like my adopters over at Equal Opportunity Kitchen!), in which traditional South-Indian recipes are adapted for occidental ingredients and schedules. Indian food can take some initial investment because there are a lot of spices to buy, but spices keep forever and you can use them to make lots of ordinary dishes taste amazing. I decided to invest in learning to cook Indian food when I realized I was spending all my money eating at Indian restaurants :-) Believe it or not, aside from the lamb, I had all the ingredients already on hand for this recipe!

Now, these girls do lots of prep. They peel and cut everything at once so all they have to do is add it to the pot. I'm not always so organized, but I'll write it down that way and you can do as you please. The only thing I never prep first is the potatoes because then they just sit there all peeled and naked, while the rest of the dish cooks... scandalous!

Cut the lamb into bite-sized pieces. Peel the onions, putting aside the first layer of each one. Slice the rest of the onions and set aside. Cut the tomatoes into large chunks. Peel and chop the ginger (alternatively, if someone you know is not big on ginger, you can leave it whole for flavor and take it out to serve). Peel the garlic cloves and cut in half.

To prepare the coconut sauce, heat the olive oil in a pan. Add one of the reserved onion layers, thinly sliced, and the coconut. Cook on medium heat for 8 minutes (the coconut will start to brown) and add the cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, pepper and curry leaves. Cook, stirring, another minutes or two and remove from heat. Let cool while you're cooking the rest. Once cool, add 1/2 cup water and mix well.

In a large pot, put in the lamb, onion, tomatoes, ginger, garlic, turmeric, fresh hot pepper, and pinch of cayenne. Salt and add the lemon juice. Add 1 1/2 - 2 cups water (enough to just barely cover the meat and veggies) and bring to a boil. Cover and let simmer 25-30 minutes.

Peel, chop and add the potatoes, masala powder, and coconut sauce. Let simmer another 15 minutes or so, until the potatoes are tender. Taste and adjust the seasoning.

For the garnish, heat the ghee/butter in a small pan. Brown the 2 reserved onion layers, thinly sliced. Either mix into the curry, or (as I prefer) use to garnish.

Ok, this is a long entry, but I can't let you go without saying how happy I am because my wonderful mentors, Psychgrad and Giz, over at Equal Opportunity Kitchen, have given me an award:

Yay yay yay! There don't appear to be specific rules for accepting this award, but I would like to send it along to two cooking blogs that I really appreciate.

One old favorite:First to Camille over at croquecamille, my fellow Paris blogger, pastry chef extraordinaire, and (along with her husband Nick), cook of the best mexican food in the area :-) Her blog talks about living and working in Paris and cooking with the ingredients found here. If you haven't visited her blog, you definitely should.

And one new favorite:Lately I discovered this relatively recent blog, Apples and Butter, and I've been thoroughly enjoying every entry so far. The concept is to balance apples (the healthy) and butter (the rich) and so far the recipes seem to do just that with a nice dose of delicious. Also I was thrilled to see that Apples and Butter has been adopted by Kristen herself over at Dine and Dish, so I'm sure you'll be hearing more about it!

Also, I would like to send off this award to one non-cooking blog that's very close to my heart, a French literary blog to be exact (although you will find some material in a rubric in English), Le blog littéraire de Delphine Kilhoffer. D.K. talks about life as a writer/proofreader in Paris, about books, about words, and lots of other interesting topics. This site definitely merits the title "Brilliante Weblog".

12 September 2008

Well, even though I have two wonderful parents, a great family, and a wonderful partner, I now have someone to add to my blogging family: I've been adopted!!!

This project began with Kristen at Dine and Dish. She gathered all the participants and paired them off into happy mentor/mentee(?) couples. Now we have three months to share with one another, to tutor and to be tutored in the great wide blogosphere, and more particularly, the world of cooking blogs (click on image for more info).

I have been adopted by Giz and Psychgrad over at Equal Opportunity Kitchen and I'm sure you'll be hearing lots more about them in near future! I'm away for the weekend so no Sunday baking this week, but click on the link to check out previous Sunday recipes and look forward to more yummy stuff when I return...

Besides eating local food that's in season (and, of course, cooking your own food), one way to cut costs in your food budget is to get what's on sale in bulk and cook it up right away (look for what I did with some past-its-sell-by-date very cheap lamb later this week). Although I don't usually buy fruits and vegetables at the supermarket, preferring the farmer's market, I couldn't stop myself when I saw a whole flat of nectarines (grown in France) for 2 euros this week! They weren't quite ripe yet but a few days in the sun (or under the cloudy parisian skies in this case) took care of that problem and then I had a whole flat of nectarines to use.

First I made a nectarine compote at D's request. It was extremely simple: I just boiled the nectarines in a little bit of water and sugar with a dash of vanilla and lemon juice. The hardest part was peeling, pitting and slicing the nectarines. We had some warm and some cold and some over ice cream. It was absolutely delicious however we ate it.

Then, at the organic farmer's market yesterday, there were greengages (or Reine Claude's) all over and I was inspired by Sam's search for them in a recent post (sorry Sam, not trying to make you jealous, but if you pop over to Paris, I can tell you where to find some), and so I bought some to pair with the rest of my nectarines. I thought I would make a regular pie, but leafing through one of my favorite recipe books, The Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts, I saw a recipe for peach pie with a gingerbread crust and I knew I had found the touch my fruit needed. The filling proposed by the recipe had fresh ginger root in it. I didn't put any in because D. has an aversion to it (why??), but I'm sure it would be delicious.

Crust:

1 1/2 cups white flour1/2 cup packed brown sugar1 tsp ground ginger1 tsp cinnamon1/4 tsp allspice1/2 tsp salt1 tsp baking powder1/2 cup chilled butter (I actually used a bit less than that because I didn't have enough butter in the house, but it turned out just fine)1 Tbsp molasses (I haven't found molasses in France, so I used 1 Tbsp honey and a tiny bit of vanilla extract)2 Tbsp cold water

To make the crust, mix together the flour, brown sugar, ginger, cinnamon, allspice, salt and baking powder (the original recipe says to sift but I just used my fingers to crumble any lumps). Cut the butter into the dry ingredients using a pastry cutter or your fingers. Work until the mixture is crumbly and resembles cornmeal. Drizzle the molasses (or honey) and water over the mixture and mix with your fingertips until the crumbs begin to cling together.

Set aside 1/2 cup of the crust dough and knead the rest into a ball. Press it into the bottom and sides of a pie pan and bake for 10-15 minutes. (My crust was sticking to the pie pan once the pie was cooked so I might try greasing it next time.)

Toss together the peaches, greengages, brown sugar, and nutmeg. Dissolve the cornstarch into the lemon juice. Drizzle over the fruit and mix together.

When the crust is baked, pour the fruit into the pie pan. Crumble the remaining dough on top and bake the pie for 40-55 minutes. Check the pie during cooking and cover with aluminum foil if the crust is getting very brown.

When the pie is done (fruit tender, juice bubbling, crust browned), remove from the oven and cool before serving.

06 September 2008

Well, here we go, I've finally given in to this Web 2.0 craze and created myself a Google Reader page to follow all your wonderful blogs. Am I talking gibberish? The video on the google reader website that explains the system by comparing it to your email inbox. You don't have to contact all your friends to see who has written you, their emails just come right to you. In the same way, when you use a reader to follow websites, you don't have to click through all your links to know who's posting, the new posts show up right away in your reader.

Oh. You knew all that already? Ok, then. In that case, you're already subscribed to my blog, right? No?? I made it super easy to subscribe: just click on the link on the left sidebar under "Subscribe" and choose your reader. Get it? Got it? Good! Welcome!

The Questions:1. What is your first name?2. What is your favorite food?3. What high school did you go to?4. What is your favorite color?5. Who is your celebrity crush?6. What is your favorite drink?7. What is your dream vacation?8. What is your favorite dessert?9. What do you want to do when you grow up?10. Who/ what do you love most in life?11. Choose one word that describes you?12. What is your Flickr name?